If you realize that you have done this, you need to stop and look at your characters again. You’ve got to go into these people, and since you don’t know them, this means that you need to go into you, wonderful you, who has so many problems and idiosyncrasies—you, who will be able to figure out what is true for these people and hence, what they would or would not do in a given situation.

Pay attention to what you pay attention to, with confidence and without apology.

And then, to dive deeper into the detail of your loves, look carefully for three signs of love. We’ll explore them in the next few chapters.

What I missed, and what got me so lost in my personal life, was the emotional power of being seen for who I truly am. Love, in any relationship, is not protection—it is not someone reaching in and saving you from yourself.

Love is not diversity—it is not someone complementing your personality with different strengths.

Love is not similarity—it is not someone sharing your interests, or values, or dreams.

Love is someone seeing the fullness of you and wanting you to be the best possible version of you. This is what a relationship is for—any relationship, whether friend, business partner, sibling, or lover. It is for each person to do all they can to help the other express their uniqueness as powerfully as possible. Love’s goal is to make the other person bigger.

Seeing someone with love means keeping your rose-tinted glasses on. The researchers called this your benevolent distortion. Thus your partner isn’t disorganized, they’re spontaneous. Not willful, but self-assured. Not flirtatious, but charming. If you see your partner through the lens of benevolent distortions, then you become more confident in your decision to tie your life to your partner’s. This confidence breeds intimacy, and this intimacy strengthens your love, which leads to yet more benevolent distortions, and so to more confidence, to more intimacy, in an ongoing upward spiral of love.

We specifically asked research assistants who did not have extensive training in psychology to rate the emotions in these videos. Would these untrained observers’ natural human ability to recognize how others are feeling be useful in predicting stability in relationships?

Five years later, we checked back with the couples to see how they were doing. Some were still together, some were not. When we set their relationship status beside our research assistants’ ratings of emotions in their earlier interactions, we found that the ratings predicted with close to 85 percent accuracy which couples had stayed together. This is consistent with many other studies showing that emotions between partners are a critical indicator of whether intimate relationships thrive or fail. The fact that raters with no special knowledge of psychology could accurately predict relationship strength was significant because it showed that most adults have a facility to accurately read emotions. Most of the raters had not yet experienced deep, longer-term relationships, yet when they looked closely, they could sense important, sometimes subtle emotions and behaviors in the couples. Emotions drive relationships, and noticing them matters.